Minneapolis Pet News Roundup ~ May 2011

A listing of all the Minneapolis Pet News Examiner articles published in May. Lots of events and observances.

Be Kind to Animals Week 2011
National Specially-abled Pets Day 2011
National Hug Your Cat Day 2011
National Dog Bite Prevention Week
Minneapolis ranks high for dog attacks on postal workers
Help for displaced, lost pets after Twin Cities tornado

Donations to help North Minneapolis residents and pets are still needed! Check out the Resource Sheet for North Minneapolis Post-Tornado Relief Efforts to discover how you can help.

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Oldest Readable Writing in Europe Uncovered

Last week in the Mother of All Mother Tongues post, the earliest spoken languages and their evolution into modern day dialects were discussed. This week, a quick post about an ancient tablet found to have the oldest readable writing in Europe.


The tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350 B.C. The Mycenaeans dominated much of Greece from about 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C. They were made legendary in part by Homer's Iliad.

Found in what's now known as the village of Iklaina, markings on the clay tablet fragment measuring roughly 1 inch tall by 1.5 inches wide are early examples of a writing system known as Linear B. Used for a very ancient form of Greek, Linear B consisted of about 87 signs, each representing one syllable.

The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic matters of interest to the ruling elite. Fittingly, the markings on the front of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the researchers say. The back lists names alongside numbers—probably a property list.

Excavations at Iklaina have yielded evidence of an early Mycenaean palace, giant terrace walls, murals and an advanced drainage system, but the tablet was a big surprise. According to dig director Michael Cosmopoulos and what is currently known about the civilization, the tablet shouldn't exist.

First, Mycenaean tablets weren't thought to have been created so early. Second, literacy was not widespread at the time and until now, tablets had been found only in a handful of major palaces (although the Iklaina site once boasted a palace, at the time the tablet was created the settlement was merely a satellite of the bigger city of Pylos). Third, because these records tended to be saved for a relatively short time, the clay wasn't intended to last and should have crumbled long ago.

These finance-related tablets weren't meant to be permanent. They were not baked to harden properly, only dried in the sun which made them very brittle. When whoever was keeping the record no longer needed it, it was thrown into the garbage pit. In this case, when the pit later caught fire, the heat hardened and preserved what was left of the tablet.

While the Iklaina tablet is an example of the earliest writing system in Europe, other writings are older. For example, writings found in China, Mesopotamia, and Egypt are thought to date as far back as 3,000 B.C.

Linear B itself is believe to have originated from an older, as-yet undeciphered writing system known as Linear A. Archeologists think Linear A is related to the older hieroglyph system used by the ancient Egyptians. As for Linear B, the ancient Greek alphabet eventually overtook it and later evolved into the 26 letters used in many languages today.

The study on this tablet was published in the April issue of the journal Proceedings of the Athens Archaeological Society.

Mother of All Mother Tongues

All the world’s 6,000 modern languages likely have origins in a single Mother Tongue spoken by early Africans about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, a study suggests. The finding may help to explain how the first spoken language developed, dispersed among the population and helped to advanced to the evolutionary achievements of the human species.

The author of the study, Quentin Atkinson, is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has found the first migrating populations that left Africa laid the foundation for all the world's cultures by taking a lone language with them when they left.

About 50,000 years ago (though the exact timeline is debated) there was an abrupt shift in how humans behaved. This is when they first began to generate cave art, bone artifacts and more complex hunting tools. Many experts contend that this creative burst was probably caused by the development of language, which not only enabled abstract thought but also its communication to other people. The good doctor's work supports this idea.

"[Language] was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of," Dr. Atkinson said.

His research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group.

Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar effect could be recognized in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated in Africa and then expanded elsewhere.

After examining 504 worldwide languages, Dr. Atkinson found that dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropic islands in the Pacific.

The study also found that the pattern of phoneme usage globally mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity, which also declined as modern humans set up colonies elsewhere. Today, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa that have hosted human life for millennia still use far more phonemes in their languages than more recently colonized regions do.

"It's a wonderful contribution and another piece of the mosaic" supporting the out-of-Africa hypothesis, said Ekkehard Wolff, professor emeritus of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leipzig in Germany, who read the paper.

These conclusions are compatible with the reigning thoughts on the origin of modern humans, known as the "out of Africa" hypothesis. Boosted by recent genetic evidence, this theory alleges that modern humans first emerged in Africa alone, about 200,000 years ago. Then, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 years ago (you'd think they'd be able to narrow that gap a little), a fraction of the population moved out and colonized the rest of the world. They became the ancestors of all non-African populations on earth.

When it comes to the origin of the earliest languages, it's a lot harder to determine. Truly ancient languages haven't left much evidence for scientists to study because languages weren't written down until thousands of years later.

Only humans have the capacity to communicate with this language based on different grammar rules and in written form. It enables us to share ideas with others and even pass them directly on to future generations. Without language, culture as we know it wouldn't exist, so it's not hard to understand why scientists want to know more about it.

Read more about Dr. Atkinson's study.

"Um" and "Uh" Help Toddlers Learn New Words

I had a few teachers and professors who had trouble making it through a full sentence without sprinkling in a few too many "ums" and "uhs". Seems a bit ironic after reading about this new study.

A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Rochester's Baby Lab conducted a study which shows toddlers actually use their parents' fumbling (referred to technically as speech disfluencies) as a signal to help them learn language more effectively.

For instance, say you're walking through the zoo with your two-year-old and you are trying to teach him animal names. You point to the rhinoceros and say, "Look at the, uh, uh, rhinoceros." It turns out that as you are fumbling for the correct word, you are also sending your child a signal that you are about to teach him something new, so he should pay attention, according to the researchers.

Young kids have a lot of information to process while they listen to an adult speak, including many words that they have never heard before. If a child's brain waits until a new word is spoken and then tries to figure out what it means after the fact, it becomes a much more difficult task and the child is apt to miss what comes next, says Richard Aslin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and one of the study's authors.

"The more predictions a listener can make about what is being communicated, the more efficiently the listener can understand it," Aslin said.

Yet as a teenager and later as an adult attending class with a few teachers and professors who employed these "disfluencies" too often made it almost impossible to learn. In high school, it was funny and there was lots of giggling at the teacher's expense. In college, it was funny, too... at first. With one prof, we even kept a daily tally of how many of each he used. It would quite often get into the 600s for a one-hour class (For those of you keeping score, that is upwards of 10 per minute or one every six seconds).

So there I was in a class on which I spent my hard-earned money, so distracted by this man's inability to speak that I was counting his disfluencies. A lot of people could get past it, it was sheer torture for me. Needless to say, contrary to how it works when you're a toddler, "uhs" and "ums" are not conducive to learning when you're cognizant enough to know that's what you're sitting down to accomplish.

Anyways, in the study, the effect was only meaningful in children two years or older. When kids are between the ages of two and three, they usually are at a stage of development where they can create basic sentences of about two to four words. They also tend to have a vocabulary of a few hundred words. Younger children most likely haven't learned yet that disfluencies tend to precede new or unknown words.

Read more about how the study was conducted by Prof. Aslin, along with Celeste Kidd, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, and Katherine White, a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester who is now at the University of Waterloo.

Bad Ad Placement Example 2

It's been a long time since Bad Ad Placement Example 1, but it's been a goal of mine to post more regularly about this kind of stuff. Badly placed ads can be simply in bad taste or catastrophic, among other things. I would say the two below appearing on the same page as a story about Osama bin Laden's burial at sea would fall in the funny and gross categories, respectively.

Win a Catch of a Lifetime

Half Off Fish and Chips

As a side note, it is a little weird that I always seem to notice this type of thing more often when the topic is serious like the two listed above.

Source: Video of bin Laden's sea burial to be released?

World Press Freedom Day 2011

May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. Its observance aspires to raise awareness of why press autonomy is important and remind governments of their duty to uphold the human right to freedom of expression.

The day was chosen to mark the anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek. Written two decades ago in 1991 by African newspaper journalists who had experienced intimidation, imprisonment and censorship for performing their jobs, this statement of press freedom principles calls for independent and pluralistic media throughout the world. The declaration also asserts that freedom of expression is more than a fundamental human right: A fully independent press is also essential for a successful democracy to flourish.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) marks World Press Freedom Day each year with a conference that brings together media professionals, press freedom organizations and UN agencies to discuss the state of press freedom worldwide and solutions for how to address the difficulties. For the first time ever, the 2011 World Press Freedom Day conference is being hosted by the United States. It began on May 1 in Washington, D.C. and continues through today.

The theme of this year's event is "21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers". Its aim is to re-affirm basic principles of media freedom in the digital age, 20 years after the original declaration was made in Windhoek, Namibia, to address print publishing and long before the Internet, mobile phones and social media were ubiquitous. More and more, "citizen journalists" are playing a major role in reporting the news, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

The timing of World Press Freedom Day this year is significant in light of recent events during which several notable journalists, media assistants and "netizens" lost their lives or were imprisoned while trying to gather information in war-zones. As of the time this post was published, 18 journalists and 2 media assistants have been killed and 151 journalists, 9 media assistants and 128 netizens have been imprisoned, according to figures tracked by Reporters Without Borders.

Reporters Without Borders has also released its 2011 list of predators of press freedom. Most notably, some people are missing this year compared to the 2010 list due to citizen rebellions. The first to go was Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was forced to step down in January.

Other predators such as Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Saleh, who has been overwhelmed by the wave of protests sweeping his country, or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is responding with terror to his people’s democratic aspirations, could also fall. And what of Muammar Gaddafi, the Guide of the Revolution, now the guide of violence against his people, a violence that is deaf to reason? And Bahrain’s King Ben Aissa Al-Khalifa, who should one day have to answer for the deaths of four activists in detention, including the only opposition newspaper’s founder, and the vast repressive operation against pro-democracy protesters?

Freedom of expression has been one of the first demands of the region’s peoples, one of the first concessions from transitional regimes, and one of the first achievements, albeit a very fragile one, of its revolutions.

See the full list of all 38 predators to press freedom from Reporters Without Borders site.

About the image: Located in the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the Journalists Memorial pays tribute to reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died reporting the news. The names of 2,007 individuals from around the world are etched in its glass currently. The memorial is rededicated each year to add the names of journalists who lost their lives in the preceding year.